At CES 2025 we finally had the chance to go hands-on with the Pimax Crystal Super which was supposed to go out to paying customers this month already. With this launch window in mind, I was wondering why I did not receive a pre-production unit earlier to record content about the Super. Now I know: it simply is not ready yet. At CES we checked out pre-productions samples from the DVT stage, which is still months away from actually mass production, if the standard process of quality hardware development is followed. Still, we could already see the headset’s potential to be one of the most important PCVR headsets for enthusiasts in 2025. There is a lot to like here but unfortunately it also comes with some drawbacks that hopefully still can be fixed until the device goes out to consumers. There is lots of ground to cover, so let’s get into it!
Overview, Features
Let’s start witht the basics. The Pimax Crystal Super is the successor to the Pimax Crystal Light. It’s a wired PCVR headset that finally comes in an updated, smaller housing that is about 30% smaller than the Crystal Light. In terms of weight it is about the same unfortunately and we will talk about that when we get to the comfort section. The upgrades come in the visuals. The headset now features a higher resolution of 3840×3840pixels per eye. That are a lot of pixels and if you are wondering, yes, these are the same panels that are used in the Varjo XR4.
The headset also offers eye-tracking, automatic IPD adjustment and a bigger FOV of 120°H according to Pimax. So, this should all be a nice upgrade to your Pimax Crystal Light!
The headset can only be purchased through the Pimax Prime subscription and costs around $1800.
Visuals
Let’s talk about the visuals. Yes, this headset looks great! What directly wowed us is its incredible brightness! Especially the DCS demo was so bright, it felt like you should better wear sun glasses within the headset to protect your eyes. This should be one of the brightest VR headsets out there and if you enjoy bright virtual worlds, this may be for you! Also the higher resolution is visible and it is a noticeable step up from the Crystal Light. However, the Crystal Light with its 2880 × 2880 pixels per eye already has such a good picture quality that we slowly can expect only diminishing returns.
Displays
So lets get into detail. We know these QLED displays from the Varjo XR4. They are incredibly bright and colors are vibrant and life-like. They come with local dimming that has much more dimming zones than the Crystal Light offered. And we could tell when testing out Air Car. The blacks were truly black and the neon colors still popped. It did not feel like the whole picture was dimmed down, a problem we often experienced with the Crystal Light. So as far as colors and resolution are concerned, these panels really shine and will make many of you very happy.
Unfortunately, they also come with some problems. In the pre-production units we tested at CES, Mura was painfully visible. Especially in those bright scenes, like looking at the sky in DCS, you could see the typical Mura irregularities. And just like in the Varjo XR 4, the dreaded “tiger stripes” are back. These are visible vertical lines or brighter and darker areas. It is simply nothing that you want to see in a headset that will set you back around $2000. Pimax says they are aware of these issues and that they will fix that for the production units. I am personally not too optimistic about it and will believe it only when the majority of customers gets flawless panels.
Lenses
The lenses looked good. They are still aspheric glass lenses like in the Crystal Light. They still introduce distortions if you are not in the distortion sweetspot, just like every aspheric lense does. I had a good visual experience from edge to edge and comparing them to the Crystal lenses, they even seemed to be a bit better as far as edge to edge clarity is concerend. I will give you a more in-depth assessment once I have access to a review unit. But so far everything seemed fine about these lenses.
FOV
The Field Of View is one of those improvements of the Super over the Crystal LIght. It is indeed bigger and I would compare it to the FOV of the PSVR2. Pimax says the super has around 120° horizontal FOV and that should be about right this time. We actually measured the FOV using the TestHMD application and both Marco and I got to 116° horizontal and 88° vertical FOV. The vertical measurement seems not impressive, but it did not feel as small as it sounds. The distortion profile that was running on this specific headset seemed to render a bit less of FOV to minimize distortion problems. So we will have to wait with final measurments once we get hands on a production unit. But again, FOV seemed nice and together with the high resolution and the bright picture, you will have a good time in VR!
Binocular Overlap
The binocular overlap here is acceptable. It is nothing to write home about, but it is much better than what the Varjo XR4 offers and that is good news. I could not recommend the XR4 to anyone because of the dismal binocular overlap, so now finally thanks to the Super we can enjoy these high-resolution panels with a better stereo overlap. It’s still not fantastic though and probably compareable to what you get in the Quest 3, but well, it is acceptable at least.
Distortions
Unfortunately these preproduction headsets were still plagued with distortions. The distortion profile simply did not feel correctly dialed in yet. When moving around, objects would distort very noticeably, changing their geometry. In our very first demo we even had pupil swim, but it seems that was only a problem of that certain demo.
We had to visit the Pimax booth twice for a second take, because on the very first day the distortion problems were so severe that I personally could not enjoy the headset at all. When we came back 2 days later, the team had updated the firmware that was then using a better distortion profile that this preview is now based on. It was still not perfect but I believe Pimax can still polish this until the headset is being sent out to actual customers.
Eye-Tracking
Unfortunately these pre-production units did not have eye-tracking installed yet. So therefore we could not test its accuracy or find out about how much of a performance boost it could give us. So again, this is not yet ready for prime-time and would need a couple of more months for sure to become a viable product from my estimation.
Comfort
Now let’s talk about the new headset design. It is indeed smaller than before while still sticking to the typical Pimax design elements. It is simply a smaller Pimax Crystal. Unfortunately, the weight did not change a lot. So this is not a lightweight.
More importantly the headstrap is now more of a halo style design. All of the weight is now held by a forehead cushion and the rest of the facial interface is merely a soft rubber material to keep out the light, very compareable to the design of the Meganex Superlight 8K for example. The big difference unfortunately is the weight of the headsets though. While in general I love the halo style concept and it is incredibly comfortable with very light headsets, my very first impression here was not as impressive as I had hoped for. All the weight is now concentrated on only your forehead and when doing quicker head movements there is a lot of inertia. More than with the Crystal Light actually. It was so bad that the internal IMUs would register my movements as knocking on the side of the headset which then activated the pass-through mode. We had more stability and less inertia with the standard face gasket design of the Crystal Light.
Of course these are only my first impressions after using the headset for only a short session. It felt okay but not like a big improvement compared to Crystal Light that I am using with the Studioform mods.
Audio
The headsets were equipped with the standard SMAS audio solution but can be upgraded to the better DMAS audio. The expo environment was too loud to actually judge the sound. I personally would prefer the device to ship with the better audio solution from the get go, especially considering the premium price.
Controllers & Tracking
Nothing has changed here and we are still using the same Crystal controllers. That is perfectly fine though and the inside-out tracking of the headset also worked just as good as we remember it from the Crystal Light. However, in the demos we could not really test controller tracking because we were in flight sims most of the time. So we will have to postpone a final judgement to when a final review unit is available.
Conclusion
The Pimax Crystal Super has a lot of potential. Once it is ready and all distortion and mura problems are solved, as well as eye-tracking built in, this could actually be one of the most exciting headsets for PCVR enthusiasts out there. It is a good step up from the Crystal Light in terms of resolution, brightness, local dimming and FOV. If that incremental step up is worth the additional $1000 on top of the Crystal Light’s asking price though depends on you. For many this will be the case, and that includes me as well, but the Crystal Light still offers the best bang for its buck and an exceptional visual quality for an under $1000 asking price, while not being plagued by the mura problems that Super owners most likely will have to get used to.
So at this point in time, with the early DVT pre-production unit we saw here that still had too many problems, I could not really recommend to pre-order the headset, but instead I would wait and find out if Pimax can really solve the panel problems for the final mass production units. The Pimax Crystal Light though is much cheaper, available right now and might be a very good alternative for many of you that are looking for a visual upgrade in VR!
I am personally still looking very much forward to this headset though because it does improve on what we have right now, even it is not a complete game-changer. So thanks to Pimax for sticking to PCVR and constantly improving our favorite past-time!